Our Week in the Forest...

“It’s like singing carols in September!”, has been said a few times this week, but the unusually mild weather has not stopped our Christmas cheer. Our hello song has been hijacked and we’ve had lots of Rudolphs, Dancers, Prancers and Dashers. How many more can you name? We’ve had Elves, Santas, snowmen and Mrs Clause. Children have turned up in Christmas outfits and it’s provided such a jovial atmosphere around the forest (not that we need an excuse to have fun and be silly in the forest!).

The children have made decorations this week by drilling holes in tree cookies and then threading string through the holes. Some said they’d hang them on their trees, others thought they’d make nice presents whilst some of our Little Forest Folk-ers just wanted to wear them as necklaces or bracelets.

For our cookery class this week the children made Christmas tree pizzas. They sampled olives, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes, mozzarella, pepperoni and more. They then cut their pizza bases into Christmas tree shapes and then decorated them however they chose.

There have been lots of Christmas activities but that’s not all we’ve done. The children enjoyed taking part in a treasure hunt where a map of the camp was drawn and they had to follow the map to find the treasure. Each time the treasure box of tree cookies was found, a shrill of excitement could be heard. The box would then be hid again in ever more tricky locations, yet by following the map and recognising what the different items on the map were, the children always managed to find the treasure.

This led on to another activity where the children were interested in following a compass. On a particularly breezy day in the forest, we placed ‘wind wands’ around. When you work in early years anything can be made to sound exciting and fun – these were sticks with string attached! However, the children loved standing beside them and using the compass to see which direction the wind was blowing.

It has been a Christmas themed week to say the least, however it’s brought about lots of important and interesting discussions with the children where some talked about how they don’t celebrate Christmas but celebrate lots of other celebrations. For some of our younger children the idea of not celebrating Christmas seemed a little incomprehensible, but our older children began to develop an understanding of how where we live and across the world there are lots of people who believe and celebrate different things.